Metamorphoses
It may have been that fearful hope, moved by agony, that caused a slippage of the faces we had taken for protection, flimsy as they were. Then we became something cloudlike, breathing, and the sound of us was music. The music of us was made of what we had known in the time before we knew faces. We could hear much when we were nothing and no one.
Movements of a charged particle.
What strange gravity is this, which won’t be understood by common measurements––of time, or distance, mass or reason––against which I have been trained to measure and describe what I am? Against (or within) this, I am a particle at a level beneath the body, beneath even what I took to be the building blocks of any body, and I am charged before I am, without an after, circling in exchange with other bodies, perpendicular to the threads of a vast web I cannot see, and I do not know myself.
The weight of being
. . . Okay, but here is a warning. I am no machine, so you will not make me faster or more efficient by dismantling my parts and addressing them one at a time. I will not be fixed. Repair, on the other hand, is a process I welcome. Now I am seas against shores and now I am a single battered rock and next thing you know I will be washed up, waiting, smooth and gleaming at a shore, unnoticed tide after tide until one day there is someone walking low to the ground on uncertain feet to find the wonder of the moment, the smooth weight of so much wear, round and solid in her toddler’s hand.
Among leaves
These new ones, just arrived, kept coming to be washed. We tried. To know that river, hear her birds, those faithful attendants hidden behind the leaves of endless pages, the pulse of bees beyond the labyrinth of things that destroy in the name of saving. We try again.
The open mouth
If it gets so dark
that singing seems
to stop
like a final answer
to that constant question
would you find me
where I wait
in silent suspension
open mouthed or tight-lipped
and remind me back
to music
one faltering note
at a time
to the beginning of the first
song?
Would I know
what lives
at the bottom
of the first
breath to rhyme
with the heights
of the last?
Would it know
me? Could it
enter, even
then?
Witness standing
Stars throb against the rim of what I see, and my reaching hands hold like waving a signal to the departed, We’re over here! Come join!
And in their winking response I glimpse the humor of their restraint before my limits. I always think the thing to bear is longing and never consider arrival, or the unspoken answer to the questions I’ve begged.
And where do you think we’ve gone off to? And which of us is missing, now?
And how we called us once
When I lived here before, I had many names because the pretense of sticking to one had yet to be invented. I can bet you did, too. But of course, that was another here, and we never thought to set it all down for the record or posterity because those habits didn’t come until the static names, weighted to set into stones and books and badges. At first, we were excited to carry these like weights in our pockets. They kept us, as the saying went, grounded.
Before, I had names for the birds and the ones they called me, the grasses and what they whispered back; the suggestions of skies–––and not one of these was ever wrong.
Perhaps wrongness came later, too, or at least the modern form of it––the looming concrete tower with eyes on every side, ready to fire, that leaden shadow draping its weight over all the places where our names used to breathe.
In birdcall fields.
Sometimes I dream of following deer past abandoned gold mines on paths overgrown with oak and eucalyptus, with manzanita in bloom, in a dew-slick early morning where birdcall is so thick I can’t help laughing, calling back. Hi birds! And what is going on? as they continue and the widening thirst of this overstretched heart can’t help but hear what follows as a kind of answer, singing Us, us! Hey girl, look at us! Hubris, sure, but such is the lens most readily available to my kind. If I were someone wiser, an owl maybe, I would use sound to trace the silhouette of the tiniest among us as though to call it out, that form, from someplace just behind the center of an ancient hunger. Then I could stop asking what is going on because no answer could match my songsight.
First steps.
In the language I am learning, I can only falter, halting between words. I move from one syllabic rock to the next with unsure steps, their surface shining, wet, and try not to slip into the stream of all I imagine possible to say, if only I knew more of these words, how to handle their music well enough that they would hold we, floating like a pair of otters under skies that would still defy naming yet welcome the earnest try.
In time.
Until the broken tongue in the bent form
of history’s would-be redemption unbows
from beneath the shadow of the sniper,
the nightstick, the circling drone, to find
home in a strange land and its decorated
self the stranger––
to bow again, this time before the feet
of an unwashed other, possibly unclean,
to cleanse and oil the cracked skin, to tend
and wrap the open wounds, to fester––
with anger at the noble cult that glorified
the ends that fed on broken limbs and
shattered skulls, on cages and contract
killings and called them means––
to find at the pause between tending
one and moving to the next, no fix
but flesh in its rank, ripe, hungry
wailing
needy mess, how it shakes in the
howl of a louder wind––
it will not turn,
though the turning
force insists––
the full weight
of its widening arc––
coming.
